TRAVERSING Z

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catching up.

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the holidays are over, the horrendous day-job project is done.  my head feels full, almost too much so.  a professor once told me that there were two kinds of writers in the world: the ones who translated their ideas into the written word and those whose thoughts were already in text.  putting aside for  a moment that this is one of those reductive models that i dislike, if i had to adopt such a binary construct, i am one of the latter.  i do actually think in sentences.  my thoughts and imaginings come replete with commas, paragraph breaks, the trailing off of an ellipsis or the pause of my beloved em-dash.  and it gets damn tiring carrying around so much text in my head, especially when i am still in this generative mode.  i have had about three different alternate prologues bounce around my cranium this past week, plus tweaking The End as it stands in my head and imagining a few stories past this main arc.  all while immersed in dinner-making and present-wrapping and day trips and phone calls.

i am tired.

tired, but back, and able now not only to write for a few days but do some other related activities.  catching up on critiques.  writing a WTF note to a dear friend who recommended the eye of the world, because man, so far that has been 162 pages of yawn.  plus it is not scratching my itch for stories with third povs mixed with omni . . .

all this, and also starting to do some hard planning for the paris trip.  mapping out the hours of various museums and libraries, writing little introductory emails to a few places.  once work starts next tuesday, it will be upon me far too soon; the more groundwork i can lay now the better.

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gros-caillou, from the turgot map.  a possible location in the novel.  of course now the biggest thing in that area is the eiffel tower, sigh . . .  it’s going to be difficult to find traces of its earlier self.

little synchronicities, again

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so now i am Back, trying to finish rousseau, and digging into writer-friends’ brains for ways to fine-tune the omni pov that is in most of the book . . . some months ago i had stuck this quote up here, part of my little collage of pictures and sayings and whatnot:

Only the evil man lives alone. – Diderot

so last night i found it again, in rousseau.  except that he put it in his confessions because he thought it was a personal dig at him, natch. ( i am in old, paranoid rousseau now.  it’s getting a little wearying.)

but he does expand on his upset, pointing out hermits and thinkers who have withdrawn from the world, how when diderot writes “alone” he really means “not-paris”.  i grew up in new york, so this rung a chord: i still know people for whom the world ends at either river, for whom moving to brooklyn is just “too far away”.

and it made me think, again, about the importance of connection in the novel.  how it has turned out thus far, with no conscious planning, that it is the solitary characters who are twisted and mad, the engines of violence.  an instictive decision? writing is a solitary act, after all, and downright violent much of the time . . .

it relates too to the pov question, how one close third just didn’t work for this, though i have written that way for much of my life.  too narrow, and without the complicated, greater context of europe in this time.  i was always presented with rousseau the great thinker, rousseau the champion of equality; i never knew of rousseau the rapist, rousseau the purchaser of 12-year-old girls.  current categories and understandings imposed on the past, to be sure; but that is part of the dynamic here, that what we would see as depraved was the norm for many, and not just a noble elite either.  hard to convey in 100,000 words or less, much less one character’s head.  perhaps it is not that the evil man lives alone, only that the solitary man is much more clearly perceived as evil, that once you are acting among many, like or against them, any such judgment becomes complicated?

and done. at last.

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can now start getting back into the swing of things.  writing.  critiquing.  oh, and there’s some kind of holiday coming up.

slowly unwinding inside.

oh, and yes: an acceptance today.  breaking the drought.  very very pleased.  faith: renewed.  energy: restored.